Infantilism

“ This is the misunderstanding fallen into by so many neurotic people, who believe that a right attitude toward reality is only to be found by way of concrete sexuality. There are even physicians, not psychoanalysts, who are of the same conviction. But this is the primitive adaptation which we find among uncivilized people under primitive conditions. If we lend uncritical support to this tendency of neurotic people to adapt themselves in an infantile way, we just encourage them in the infantilism from which they are suffering. ”

“ I'm afraid I was what the French call un enfant terrible—in the vernacular, an awful child! full of irresistible life and impulsive will; living fully in the present, looking neither before nor after; as ready to execute as to conceive; full of imagination—a faculty too often thwarted and warped by the fears of parents and friends that it means insincerity and falsehood, when it is in reality but the spontaneous exercise of faculties as yet unknown even to the possessor, and misunderstood by those so-called trainers of infancy. ”

“ A commonplace infant will tire of the choicest toys; they are to such minds but effigies and delusion, which last, the delight of imaginative infancy, to the cut and dried, dull, childish understanding is impossible. ”

“ How is it that, with the spectacle forever before our eyes of the mother and infant, mutually emparadised in child's play (that mutually educating communion of trust and love, by which the child is put into gradual possession of his body, and joyous consciousness of his individuality) ,—how is it, I say, that we find education has lost its ideal, and as soon as the child leaves the nursery for the schoolroom, an antagonism has begun, "with its blessedness at strife," and which leaves us all such scarred and bewildered creatures as we find ourselves to be, as soon as we come to reflect? ”

“ Nothing is more outrageous than to take advantage of the helplessness of childhood to sow in the brain the seeds of falsehoods, to imprison the soul in the dungeon of Fear, to teach dimpled infancy the infamous dogma of eternal pain -- filling life with the glow and glare of hell. ”

“ As the child's features—flat nose, forward-opening nostrils, large lips, wide-apart eyes, absent frontal sinus, etc.—resemble for a time those of the savage, so, too, do his instincts. Hence the tendencies to cruelty, to thieving, to lying, so general among children—tendencies which, even without the aid of discipline, will become more or less modified just as the features do. The popular idea that children are "innocent," while it is true with respect to evil knowledge, is totally false with respect to evil impulses; as half an hour's observation in the nursery will prove to any one. ”

“ One recognizes in this without any difficulty the analytic hall-marks of an infantile disposition, which, as always, is characterized by a prevalence of the parent-imago, here the mother-imago. An infantile individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from the childish environment, that is, from his adaptation to his parents. ”

“ Owing to the enormous influence of childhood on the later development of character, you can perfectly understand why we are inclined to ascribe the cause of a neurosis directly to the influences of the infantile environment. I have to confess that I have known cases in which any other explanation seemed to be less reasonable. There are indeed parents whose own contradictory neurotic behavior causes them to treat their children in such an unreasonable way that the latter’s deterioration and illness would seem to be unavoidable. ”

“ I know nothing more painful than to see a child of delicate sensibility, and lively moral sense, growing hardened to the wrong-doing of others, as it grows older, and even learning to expect it. I have seen this in more than one child, and it has made me feel that there is a limit beyond which we should not open the eyes of childhood. ”

“ What can they think of them? what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling. ”

“ The child may be 'father of the man', and the savage the hoary sire of the civilised; but to measure the full proportions of an adult from the swaddling-clothes of an infant or to estimate the aspirations of a cultured person from the narrow notions of a barbarian, is to taunt the stately oak that it was once a tiny acorn. The first germs of conscience are in the infant bosom, pregnant with possibilities of growth under the pure atmosphere of a pious home and the genial light of a godly instruction. Nor has history been barren of striking examples of the working of conscience in children. ”

“ But the child,—the child must pocket every insult, as belonging to a class beneath respect.
Is it not time that we summoned our wits from their wool-gathering,—however financially profitable the wool may be,—and gave a little honest thought to the status of childhood? Childhood is not a pathological condition, nor a term of penal servitude, nor a practical joke. A child is a human creature, and entitled to be treated as such. A human body three feet long is deserving of as much respect as a human body six feet long. ”

“ Danger of undervaluing Children’s Intelligence.—​Those of us who have watched an urchin of seven making Catherine-wheels down the length of a street, or a group of little girls dancing to a barrel organ, or small boys and girls on a door-step giving what Dickens calls ‘dry nourishment’ to their babies, or a small girl sent by her mother to make four careful [Pg 187] purchases out of sixpence and bring home the change—are not ready to believe that physical, mental, and moral development waits, so to speak, upon Kindergarten teaching. ”

“ Considering infancy in itself, is there a creature on earth more helpless, more unhappy, more at the mercy of everything around him, more in need of compassion, of care, of protection, than a child? Does it not seem as if his sweet face and touching aspect were intended to interest every one who comes near him, and to urge them to assist his weakness? ”

“ The first impulses of a baby to suck, or to grasp, are obviously 'instinctive.' But even when the unconscious or unremembered condition of infancy has been succeeded by the connected consciousness of childhood, the child will fly to his mother and hide his face in her skirts when he sees a harmless stranger. ”

“ At last, they made so much noise that I awoke, and thought to myself, "What a false dream that is, of CHILDREN!" The child is the father of the man; and wiser. Children never do such foolish things. Only men do. ”

“ Yet when prolonged beyond the age of childhood they tend to become a clog on development, and a hindrance to a wholesome life. The child who cherishes such emotion is likely to suffer infantile arrest of development, and the parent who is so selfish as to continue to expend such tenderness on a child who has passed the age of childhood, or to demand it, is guilty of a serious offence against that child. ”

“ We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise our children, analyse our children, think we are endowed with a special capacity to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we play at being children. And the result is that we are not more child-like, but our children are less child-like. It is so tiring to stoop to the child, so much easier to lift the child up to you. Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. ”

“ How easy and tempting it would have been, e.g. in the present case, to admire, excite, and develop prematurely the child's eager desire for learning, and thereby develop an unnatural blasé state and a precociousness masking a neurosis! In such cases the parents must look after their own complexes and complex tendencies and not make capital out of them at the expense of the child. The idea should be dismissed once for all that children are to be held in bondage by their parents or that they are their toys. They are characteristic and new beings. ”

“ An 11-year old child who does not perceive it is mentally deficient. A nine-year old child who does is mentally above the average. Ask that question of a bright eight-year old boy and even without the warning of something nonsensical to be expected a quizzical grin will form itself on his face and he will interrupt contemptuously with “What are you giving me?” If a man walks down hill it’ll be up hill for him on the way back.” ”

“ This predominance of self, this kinship with the unsocial brute, which shows itself in these germinal animosities, seems to be discoverable also in the unfeelingness of children. A common charge against them from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.
That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother may leave her small companion quite unconcerned. ”

“ The younger the infant, the greater the difficulties become, so that our task is not so much to trace the development of a process from simple and early forms to those which are later and more complex, as to follow a track which is comparatively plain in later childhood, but grows faint as the beginnings of life are approached.
At the age, then, of two or three the first quality of the child which may arrest our attention is his extreme imitativeness. ”

“ And we are behaving in exactly the same manner to-day with regard to the so-called education of the imagination.
We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance, and the errors of the immature mind, just as at no very remote date we were amused to see an infant laugh when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme. In short, it is we who are amused by the Christmas festivities and the credulity of the child. ”

“ Their own education should therefore enable them to implant in the tender mind, such sentiments of virtue, propriety and dignity, as are suited to the freedom of our governments. Children should be treated as children, but as children that are, in a future time, to be men and women. By treating them as if they were always to remain children, we very often see their childishness adhere to them, even in middle life. The silly language called baby talk, in which most persons are initiated in infancy, often breaks out in discourse, at the age of forty, and makes a man appear very ridiculous. ”

“ On the psychological side our knowledge of infant life is almost nil.... A prominent professor of education once said to us, “You will find when you have taught as many children as I have that you can do nothing with a child until it is over five years of age.” Our own view after studying 246many hundreds of infants is that one can make or break the child so far as its personality is concerned long before the age of five is reached. ”

“ Yet even the occasional revelations of an enfant terrible are as nothing compared to the perilous secrets which a discreet infant daily buttons up, or secures with a hook-and-eye, or even fastens with a safety-pin across its gentle bosom. ”

“ These horrible daubs so carefully collected, observed, and catalogued by modern psychologists as "documents of the infant mind" are nothing but monstrous expressions of intellectual lawlessness; they show only that the eye of their child is uneducated, the hand inert, the mind insensible alike to the beautiful and to the ugly, blind to the true as well as to the false. Like most documents collected by psychologists who study the children of our schools, they reveal not the soul but the errors of the soul ”

“ Childern is childern, the world over, an' this idea of your bein' nearer heaven when you was a child, like Cora's piece says, is rot—I beg your pardon!—nonsense! There's where lots o' folks slip up on childern. They go on the idea that young 'uns are angels to begin with, an' they break their hearts to see 'em runnin' down, as they grow up. The truth is, it's just the other way 'round. Childern is little animals at the start. ”

“ So accustomed are we to our world-old method of entrusting the first years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct, that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with the frank derision of massed ignorance. ”

“ Such habits formed in childhood are never forgotten. Superfine dressy teachers, will be too proud, and too high, to attend to these things—but the judicious mother or matron will at once see their importance and act accordingly—"as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." ”

“ A grown person and an infant, what a contrast! True it is, that many a child has become very unmanageable, but this may always be traced to early neglect. If from the earliest infancy the young mind is trained to little acts of obedience, they will soon become habitual and pleasant to perform; but if improper indulgence and foolish kindness be practised towards children, they must, of course, grow up peevish, fretful, and ill-tempered, obstinate, saucy, and unmanageable. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap." Let this truth be ever engraved upon the minds of all parents. ”

“ We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil; a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for good. ”